Michael Mager and the Case for Owning the Factory

A factory outside Dallas is an unusually solid object to find in a story about the future of computing. It has a roof, a cleanroom, and more than fifty specialized tools. In October 2023, Precision Neuroscience announced that it had bought the place. Michael Mager, its co-founder and chief executive, had arrived at a familiar business question by an unfamiliar route: how much of the work should you own?

For a company developing brain-computer interfaces, production was part of the answer. The acquisition put fabrication of its thin-film electrode arrays under its own control. The engineers could change a design and work with the people making it. A company associated with an abstract idea now had a very concrete responsibility: running a factory.

Mager had spent years buying stakes in businesses before he began building them. That distinction runs through his career. An investor can decide a company is worth owning. An operator then has to arrange Monday morning.

A summer internship that ran long

Mager grew up in New York with two rather different examples of work. His father worked in finance and served on charitable boards. His mother became a social worker after raising him and his sister. She organized visits to older people in Manhattan who often lacked family nearby. He has described both parents as having firm ethical foundations, with one career organized around commerce and the other around service.

He studied history and literature at Harvard, graduating in 2005. The next step was a summer internship in Hong Kong. A year or two abroad seemed plausible. He stayed nearly eight.

At Ward Ferry Management, he worked on investments across a region stretching from India to Australia. It was a practical education in how companies behave under different rules, in different cultures, and at different stages of development. A business model that looked sensible in one country might require a second look in another. There were actual investments behind the judgments, which gave the education a less forgiving marking system than college.

Mager rose to become a partner and portfolio manager. He later called that period his business school. The range mattered: public and private companies, industries with different economics, and management teams with different ideas about how an enterprise should run.

He left Ward Ferry in 2012, spent a year taking an MPhil in economic history at Cambridge, and returned to New York. The ambition to build companies had survived a successful career evaluating other people's. It was time to give it a larger share of the working day.

“But it was always my goal to build companies.”

Michael Mager, in conversation with Tech Optimist

Buying a business means inheriting its Tuesdays

In 2013, Mager joined Adam Jiwan and Brian Norton at Ridge Road Partners. Jiwan and Norton had formed the partnership the previous year. Its remit included both private businesses and concentrated investments in public securities. Mager would work on existing private investments and help develop its public-market activity from New York.

The structure gave this next chapter a particular character. Ridge Road had a permanent capital base and an investment horizon that could extend indefinitely. Its owner-operator model allowed the partners to acquire a business without building every decision around a scheduled exit. That arrangement cannot make an awkward operating problem disappear. It does give its owners room to work on it.

Mager's experience widened beyond investment selection. His board work included Kitchen Art of South Florida, which was sold to Ferguson, and Supply Finance, a business focused on supply-chain finance. The range is a useful corrective to the idea that a founder's career should look inevitable in retrospect. Kitchens, working capital, and legal software each come with their own customers and their own reasons for a deal to go sideways.

He also worked with established owners thinking about succession. These were businesses with customers and operating histories, where new capital and management attention could help the next stage of growth. The challenge was to understand what already worked before deciding what ought to change.

Before the arrays, the lawyers

One of the clearest examples is Assembly Software. In 2017, Ridge Road principals Jiwan and Mager made a substantial majority investment in TrialWorks and Needles, two providers of case-management software for law firms. Assembly was announced as their umbrella company in 2019.

The businesses were established operations. At the time of that announcement, they had more than fifty-five years of combined operating history, more than 2,500 law-firm clients, and over 40,000 active users. Those figures described a substantial body of existing work: software that people already relied on, with relationships built over years.

The holding-company structure was intended to accelerate technology development. Bringing the businesses together meant working with products that had their own histories and constituencies. For their owners, growth involved the responsibilities of continuity as well as the attractions of a new plan. A customer trying to manage a case has limited patience for an investor's enthusiasm about the organizational chart.

Mager became a co-founder and co-chairman of Assembly. That role remains part of his official biography. It is an instructive piece of his preparation for Precision: he had experience building around a team and a product, with a financial structure designed to support the work. His contribution was already recognizable before the technology changed.

A shared acquaintance, a different kind of company

A mutual college friend introduced Mager to Benjamin Rapoport. Rapoport brought a background in electrical engineering and years of work on brain-computer interfaces. Mager brought experience with capital, acquisitions, and operating businesses. Their interests met around the problem of turning specialized technology into a company.

The groundwork began in 2020; Precision raised its first round in 2021. Keeping those two dates in view makes the beginning easier to understand. There was a period of preparation before the financed enterprise. By the time Precision started work with a four-person team, three members had previously worked together at Neuralink.

The pairing put two kinds of judgment in the same room. Rapoport could examine the underlying technology. Mager could examine what an organization would need to develop and manufacture it. Building that organization required people, money, equipment, and an ability to explain why those resources belonged together.

Mager's executive remit includes fundraising, recruiting, communications, strategy, and commercial rollout. These responsibilities are closely connected. A new colleague needs a reason to join. An investor needs a reason to commit. A prospective partner needs to understand what the company can deliver. All three conversations depend on the same plan being credible.

The future acquires a floor plan

The Texas purchase brought Precision into microelectromechanical systems manufacturing, usually shortened to MEMS. Its subsidiary, Precision BioMEMS, acquired a 22,000-square-foot facility, including a 5,500-square-foot cleanroom and separate space for post-processing and assembly. The existing team stayed.

That last detail deserves attention. Specialized equipment is only part of a manufacturing operation. Retaining experienced staff preserved the knowledge needed to use it. Precision also planned to continue serving outside customers through the foundry, giving the facility a role beyond making its own arrays.

The strategic value was control over production and the ability to revise designs more quickly. Owning the factory brought additional obligations, but it also brought the people developing the product closer to the people fabricating it. For Mager, an acquisition had become a way to solve an operating constraint.

In February 2024, Precision and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced a three-year collaboration. The work included thin-film fabrication and materials development, with a plan to transfer techniques to Precision's Addison operation for production.

The arrangement connected a research institution with a factory capable of putting new processes to work. A discovery in a laboratory and a repeatable manufacturing method are separate achievements. The collaboration was designed to help join them. This is where the factory's place in Mager's story becomes clearer: it could receive and develop knowledge, as well as produce components.

Capital comes with a longer to-do list

On September 24, 2026, Precision announced an oversubscribed $250 million Series D. Pershing Square, the Ackman Oxman Institute, and an unnamed life-sciences investment fund co-led the round. Other participants included Duquesne Family Office, B Capital, ARK Invest, Invus, and Mubadala Capital. Precision put its total capital raised at $430 million.

The financing brought several types of investor into the same company: venture firms, public-market investors, family offices, and sovereign capital. Mager's earlier career had involved judging where to put investment money. He was now responsible for making a case to people performing that exercise on him.

In the announcement, he emphasized manufacturing, partnerships, and an organization intended to endure. The language fits a career spent moving closer to the workings of businesses. A larger financing creates capacity for the next stage; it also increases the amount of work for which management must answer.

His own habits have needed adjustment along the way. Looking back on Precision's early years, Mager described replying immediately to investors, prospective partners, and potential recruits. He had been determined never to hold anything up. Later, he recognized that some messages could wait a day or two. The inbox had been receiving rather too much executive authority.

There is an appealingly ordinary lesson in that admission. Even a company working on an unfamiliar form of computing has to decide what deserves attention today. Mager's career has carried him from New York to Hong Kong, through Cambridge, into established businesses, and finally to Precision. Along the way, the distance between assessing a problem and being responsible for it has steadily narrowed. The factory outside Dallas makes that change visible.